When a pioneer in the world of artificial intelligence like Geoffrey Hinton, the visionary behind generative AI, sounds the alarm on AI’s potential existential threat to humanity and its capacity to usher in widespread global unemployment, it demands our undivided attention. Recent statistics from employment agency Challenger, Gray & Christmas underscore the urgency of his concerns, with over 20,000 layoffs recorded in the US tech industry in May alone. Additionally, Goldman Sachs economists estimate that AI automation could potentially impact a staggering 300 million full-time jobs worldwide.
The genie of AI automation is undeniably out of the bottle, leaving us with the pivotal question of not if but how our future will be shaped by the coexistence of humans and intelligent machines.
In this swiftly evolving landscape, the logical path for humans is to double down on their intrinsic strengths, ranging from soft skills like empathy, persuasion, creative thinking, and analytical prowess to physically demanding roles such as farming, construction, and high-touch service provision. Yet, even as we seek refuge in these domains, the advent of the formidable GPT-4 raises questions about what remains exclusively within the realm of human capabilities and how we ought to respond to this generative AI powerhouse.
Entrepreneurship is the Savior for Humans?
One unique facet where generative AI currently struggles – while humans shine – is entrepreneurialism. This encompasses the capacity to strategize, navigate obstacles, and rally people and resources to initiate new ventures with defined objectives, a realm where AI falls short, at least in the foreseeable future. Entrepreneurialism is a multi-faceted skillset, with problem-solving being its foundational pillar. Effective problem-solving entails the art of posing the right questions and framing challenges in a manner that inspires innovative solutions.
Problematisation, as this skill is known, plays a pivotal role in identifying gaps, contradictions, patterns, dilemmas, and more, thereby simplifying the process of crafting and implementing solutions. It also assumes significance in prompt engineering, enhancing the ability to tackle problems and seize opportunities effectively. Importantly, effective problematisation hinges on a wealth of context-specific knowledge and insights, often unspoken and deeply ingrained, far beyond the grasp of AI models reliant on language-based communication simulations.
New Generative AI technology ChatGPT Raising Questions About Human Creativity
The second dimension of entrepreneurialism is organizing, an area where generative AI currently lags behind humans. For the foreseeable future, AI cannot orchestrate people, ideas, or resources, nor can it employ language to persuade and mobilize individuals toward shared goals. This is precisely where human prowess shines brightest, surpassing generative AI in its ability to weave in moral, religious, and cultural values, and to navigate personal passions, missions, and identities, facets foreign to AI’s understanding. Organizing, fundamentally tied to human emotions, judgment, and interhuman connection, remains an area of distinctly human expertise, inaccessible to large language models such as ChatGPT.
Intricacies of Entrepreneurship will Outshine AI?
Crucially, our capacity for moral judgment and empathy, key components of the entrepreneurial method, extends far beyond mere organizational competence. It is these uniquely human attributes that underpin not just entrepreneurship but our shared human experience itself, aspects that AI, for all its power, remains unable to replicate or replace. As we move forward into an AI-infused future, it is our mastery of these profound human qualities that will define our enduring relevance and significance in the world.
